San Bernardino residents cast their votes in the city’s general and special municipal election at the San Bernardino Mountain Search and Rescue polling location on Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2014. Only 14.4 percent of registered voters cast ballots in Tuesday’s election.

After watching months of noisy, divisive campaigns presenting starkly different pictures of how to lift San Bernardino out of what all candidates agreed was a morass of financial, safety and social worries, he and the vast majority of his neighbors said — nothing.

Only 14.4 percent of registered voters cast ballots in Tuesday’s election — with the 77,588 registered voters already representing just a fraction of the city’s 210,000 residents — a turnout that has many active residents and officials dejected.

“What more compelling issue could we have as a city that would encourage people to come out but the future of the city and how we’re going to conduct ourselves over the next number of years?” said City Clerk Gigi Hanna. “I’m just stunned that people did not feel this was more important.”

Knapp agrees it’s important — he speaks in detail about the city’s bankruptcy, accusations leveled in the mayoral campaigns and the 4th Ward he calls home, and about the lack of community buy-in that he ties to changing demographics and rising crime.

“When people hole up because they’re afraid, that creates more problems,” he said. “We don’t go out walking anymore because we don’t feel safe.”

But Knapp — a former neighborhood association president, volunteer for the Route 66 Rendezvous and city resident since 1996 as well as a period before that — says that after 46 years of voting, he’s tired of casting a ballot for people he doesn’t believe in.

“I didn’t vote because I don’t know who Carey Davis is, and he didn’t say anything during the campaign that made me think we were going to see a different city,” he said. “And Wendy McCammack I didn’t vote for because she’s already been recalled from her district — if her ward didn’t vote for her, I didn’t want to — and she was part of that old clique, the (former City Attorney James F.) Penman clique.”

He was similarly unimpressed with the two candidates in the 4th Ward, he said.

From the outside, San Bernardino’s turnout is surprising, said Ann Crigler, a USC political science professor who studies elections.

“One would not expect it to be that low when the issues are that important and on the heels of a recall effort,” she said. “However, the timing is quite unusual. So there is some fatigue from the number of election opportunities and … that the election was an off-year, off-cycle.”

The timing of San Bernardino’s elections — in odd-numbered years, unlike national elections that often draw more voters, and in February for the top two finishers following November races where no one gets 50 percent — are set by the city’s charter.

Not set by the charter, but almost as endemic to the city in terms of popular discourse, is its reputation for “toxic politics” — a major turnout turnoff, Crigler said.

“A lot of people are really fed up with the partisan bickering and polarization, and a lot of people are turning away from partisan politics for that reason,” Crigler said, speaking of what she said might be a national trend. “If all you hear about is the two sides bickering, why is there any (motivation) to vote?”

Improving the political atmosphere was a major theme of the Davis campaign for mayor — although McCammack and others took issue with the contention that she was to blame, saying she had only stood up for her beliefs and that opponents had been equally negative. An improvement to civic discourse was widely predicted by Tuesday’s victors, and McCammack urged the same on her Facebook page Wednesday.

“Asking all of our friends and supporters to be as civic minded today as they were for the past several months through the campaign season,” she wrote. “Hold your heads high, but, also hold your electeds accountable and do not stop loving San Bernardino.”

Hanna said she had expected higher turnout not only because of the importance of the issues but because residents and particularly young people had campaigned separately from the campaigns to encourage voting. Clues to increasing turnout might come from data on the age of voters — expected to be compiled Thursday — and from the fact that 10 percent of voters submitted a mail-in ballot while only 4 percent were in-person, she said.

“It’s a question that comes up at every city clerk gathering I go to,” she said.

Groups supporting both candidates and groups encouraging engagement regardless of candidate preference held numerous events this election, with particular focus since the November primary that brought only 16.2 percent of residents to vote for mayor, a marked decline from 21.6 percent four years earlier. (The number of registered voters increased by 470 since November.)

Victory can’t be measured so quickly, said Richard Tejada, spokesman for San Bernardino Generation Now, a group of young people whose attempts to increase engagement included multiple events, phone calls and door-to-door reminders.

“It’s not going to be one of those things you can change overnight. It’s a lot of hard work to make a community progress and change their way of thinking regarding voting,” Tejada said, pointing to himself as a convert who previously thought his vote didn’t matter. “Obviously the turnout was horrible, to say the least, but we’re not letting it destroy our morale.”

Engagement isn’t just about elections, Tejada said, which is why they’re now starting to meet with elected officials for ideas to increase youth political involvement in policy and apolitical events like community cleanups.

“Now that the politics that can get pretty ugly are over,” he said, “we can focus on getting the community together.”

Ryan Hagen covers the city of Riverside for the Southern California Newspaper Group. Since he began covering Inland Empire governments in 2010, he's written about a city entering bankruptcy and exiting bankruptcy; politicians being elected, recalled and arrested; crime; a terrorist attack; fires; ICE; fights to end homelessness; fights over the location of speed bumps; and people's best and worst moments. His greatest accomplishment is breaking a coffee addiction. His greatest regret is any moment without coffee.